Future Fruit

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Vines
Grape vine cuttings, wildlife twig bundle and kindling

The weather so far this year has been pretty awful (and it’s snowing again as I type this), but Saturday was sunny and I spent a couple of hours outside pruning in an attempt to ensure bountiful fruit crops in the summer. I wrapped up warm, but it wasn’t cold unless the sun went behind clouds. The chickens, who have been shut in their run for much of the winter, enjoyed a short walk around the garden and the chance to have a good dust bath inside the Grow Dome.

I had a To Do list, arranged partly in terms of urgency and partly in terms of difficulty. I started off nice and easy, pruning back my autumn-fruiting raspberries (MTP reminded me) and giving them a good mulch with partly rotted bunny litter.

While I was there I did a little bit of light pruning of the blueberries, simply to remove dead wood and relieve any congestion.

Then I was off into the chicken run to prune two of my minarette fruit trees. Winter is the time to take the tops out of the apple and pear (the instructions say to prune the ‘leader’, but mine have several branches reaching for the sky), which encourages the growth of the sideshoots that bear the fruiting spurs. Later in the year I have to prune the fruiting spurs….

The third job on the list was the trickiest – pruning the grapevine. I used to have two, but one died. The remaining one was rampant last year and escaped onto my neighbour’s side of the fence. Whilst very leafy, it was not fruitful. I am attempting to tame it by training it in the Guyot style, and have cut off all the stems bar one. It should grow two or three stems this year, which I will bend down to the horizontal next year. Or something like that. One step at a time, and step one was getting it under control. Step two is fitting the training wires. But even if my vine doesn’t fruit, it has other uses.

As I took so much wood off the grapevine, I thought I would try growing some more from hardwood cuttings. I trimmed down sections of stem, stuck them in potting compost and have left them out in the Grow Dome. If they grow I will try growing a grape in a container, which looks like fun. I can’t remember whether this is the Cabernet sauvignon or the Sauvignon blanc, so I will have to check at some point.

I also bundled up lengths of stem for a wildlife habitat, and put them down by the fence. Any dinky bits of wood I saved to fuel my Kelly Kettle.

Posted 22 February 2010, 09:34.   Posted in .
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